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In a nod to the late Roger Ebert, I’ve assembled a list of movies and shows that can endure the repeated watching that results with having an ASD person in the family. This list is highly personalized – you may find the movies I love are the ones you can’t stand – still, I’ve tried to give a quick rationale for why I like or dislike each one. There is one universal truth: if you expose ASD kids to inappropriate language, they will repeat it – in public and loudly. SpongeBob Squarepants deserves a post all to itself. You’ll have to wait for that one. The Same goes for Finding Nemo. The jury is still out on Scooby Doo.

Inexplicably, we go through pro and anti-muppet phases and continue to have lengthy discussions about the “realness” of Muppets. The Muppets are also very useful in teaching about humor and jokes like puns – ASD kids seem to read the social cues of muppets better than in actual people.

So many people think this movie is too sad, but there is no greater depiction of the mother-baby connection in animated film. The pink elephants and the crows are also objectionable to some people, but that Casey Junior Train is an icon that endures. It’s what inspired the artist in our boy. For years he would set paper, crayons and paint in front of me and make me (and his teachers) draw it over and over – and then one day he did it himself.

The older the better – Ringo, James Carlin and Alec Baldwin if you can find them. At one point I wrote to Baldwin telling him he should make videos as Mr. Conductor in which he eats a variety of foods to model good eating habits – the single act of eating celery and carrots in the Magic Railroad movie changed our lives. No, he didn’t write back.

My favorite story about this movie: when we were doing cognitive testing, the examiner asked our boy who discovered America and the answer our boy gave him was, “Christopher Plummer.” Also, he drew the cathedral wedding scene using the characters from Scooby Doo.

We canceled our premium cable channels after he stumbled on this and became obsessed by both the sex scene and the transformation from man to beast. It did help us communicate at a key point in his development because we realized that references to the Wolfman occurred when he experienced digestive pain.

Both lists could go on forever, but these are the ones that come to mind without a trip to the movie shelf. If you’ve found anything good, helpful or just fun for older kids and teens please post a comment – we are always looking for more adult content that is not too adult, in terms of language, sex and violence.

I wish there was a simple answer to this question. Was it the right thing to do? Yes. Are we glad we did it? Yes. Did it result in miraculous, instantly recognizable changes? In some of us, yes, but how if affected our boy and how it influences our next moves to plan for his transition to adulthood I am still not prepared to say. We still need to assess his physical health with regard to his diet and digestive system not to mention the dislocated knee (which appears to be fine). We also need to benchmark his academic skills and assess his social development. The latter shows greater depth and fluidity, but I can see the potential for him to fall into old patterns with old friends. He seems generally more communicative and more cooperative, though we are still in the glad-to-be-back-home honeymoon period.

Those miraculous, instantly recognizable changes allude to those of us left to fend for ourselves, boyless, at home. My own angst has been clearly documented here, but it must also be said that for all of our hand-wringing the most surprising change was that things here did not change nearly as much as we expected. Special diets, elaborate toy tableaus and the occasional Gerald Mc Boing Boing sounds are not as disruptive to our lives as we may have thought. In our case, the burdens of autism are not nearly as heavy as we were lead to expect – when he was gone we felt more far more emptiness than relief. In earlier years we may have felt it more than we did at this point but I feel the need to point out that the camp experience was more about him being away from us for his benefit, not our need to be without him. Some people really do not understand that. And we do recognize necessity that our other children need to know that his independence as an adult is just as important to us as theirs, which is a point that absolutely must be made with both actions and words. In reality, the hardest part of the camp experiment is that it is so lovely to have him home that we are loathe to think about ever letting him go away again (for the record, he is also perfectly fine with that).

And there’s the rub. The urge to become complacent is, at this early moment, almost irresistible. But we must keep our eye the prize of independence, or whatever measure of it we can hope to achieve. He is vulnerable – we know now that he can endure a lot but we also know that he may be just removed enough cognitively that he might be forced to endure things that he should not. He was in an environment that we knew would not exploit his good nature – where else can we possibly find that outside of home?

So camp, in the end, did not give us as many answers as we might have hoped, but it is making us rethink our questions.